More than 75 years later, one of Rita Stewart’s childhood experiences during World War II can still catch up with the Vancouver woman.
It can hit her in a big-box store, as Rita and husband Larry approach the tire department. She steers their cart away because the smell of rubber has an aromatic echo.
It goes back to a traumatic moment in 1939.
“We had to go to the library to get gas masks,” she said. “I vomited.”
Rita Stewart and Peter Stenhouse were among the people featured in our Sunday story, “Blitz Kids,” about life as an English youngster during World War II.
Their recollections were particularly sharp in discussing gas masks. When the war started, all London residents lived under the threat of poison gas, and children were no exception.
Stenhouse can recall going to a local school to get his mask.
“There were three straps, if I remember. They adjusted them for me so it would fit,” Stenhouse said.
For the 8-year-old Stewart, it wasn’t quite as easy.
“It was terrifying. The rubber smell was so bad. I screamed and I fought the person who was trying to put the gas mask on me.”
After she threw up, “they got very angry with me and told my mother, ‘Take her away and bring her back when she calms down.’ ”
Stewart also recalls some class distinctions in the whole exercise, “us being working class. The authorities, they were the betters.”
Eventually, the young girl got her gas mask. “You carried it everywhere you went,” Stewart said.
Stenhouse said he tried his on a couple of times.
“Foul-smelling things. To wear them for 48 hours was virtually impossible, but they could get you to a safe place,” Stenhouse said. “I never had to use it for what it was issued for. It eventually fell into disuse.”
But he wasn’t finished with them. After enlisting in the Royal Navy, Stenhouse was issued a service gas mask. It came in handy when he bought a car with a faulty front end.
“I cut 6 inches off my gas mask hose,” resulting in a flexible rubber sleeve.
“It worked out ideally to keep things in place,” Stenhouse said. “That was the best use of a gas mask I found.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
